Do you know, the Wicker Man, the Wicker Man, the Wicker Man? Do you know the Wicker Man who lives on... oh, wait... I'm thinking of the Muffin Man.

Well, I wouldn't want to call The Wicker Man a bad movie--parts of it are entertaining--but it's difficult to call it a good movie. Maybe in three or four months, when it is released on DVD, and you go to the video store for that movie you've been dying to see, and you discover that all the copies are checked out--well, then you could rent The Wicker Man. However, as the credits began to roll today, Kathy, thinking in terms of our limited entertainment budget, asked, "How much did we pay to see this?"

The Wicker Man is a remake of another film by the same name released in 1973. Evidently fans of the first film are upset over changes in the remake. Me? I'm not upset (probably because I've never seen the original). I think it's fine for movie remakes to change things. Otherwise I might as well go rent the original. I mean really, would you rather see the original Omen with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick or the nearly identical remake released earlier this year? Considering the Omen remake made very little money, I think most people will agree with me. Of course that's not to say that changes in the story will make much money for the new Wicker Man. There are too many other problems at work here.

In the new version, Nicolas Cage plays a highway patrol officer involved in a mysterious roadside accident in which two of the victims--a mother and daughter--go missing. Following the accident, Cage's character, Edward Malus, gets a letter from a long lost girlfriend who is desperate for his help in finding her missing daughter. In the photograph she sends, the little girl has a striking resemblance to the girl involved in the highway accident. Malus travels to a privately owned island where his old girlfriend lives, and he finds an entire community of people voluntarily cut off from the rest of society. Moreover, in this community, women run everything. Men are second class citizens who don't get to go to school, have to do all the hard work, and seem to be a much smaller percentage of the population. All the women are "Sister Something": Sister Willow, Sister Rose, Sister Thorn, Sister Honey, Sister Beech, Sister Violet, etc. The only Sister I didn't see was Sister Soluja (sorry, I know that was bad). As the story progresses, Malus finds himself wrapped up in a very complex deception going back much further than he he initially realizes. I really don't want to tell you much more than this because to do so would spoil the story if that other movie is already rented out at the video store and you decide to get this one. I will give this much away, though: contrary to the misleading trailers, there is absolutely nothing supernatural in this story. Of course, that doesn't make it believable.

The movie is simply flawed in multiple places. Overall, I really like Nicolas Cage as an actor, but this was not the role for him. He seemed not to know what to do with the character, sometimes playing Malus over the top, and sometimes so subdued that I thought maybe the villains had drugged him (which they had not). The pacing was usually too slow throughout the movie--a no-no for a thriller of any kind. And the dialogue was often so stilted that it was laughable like a love scene in a Star Wars prequel. The plot itself was extremely predictable, and Kathy and I had it pretty much figured out by the halfway point of the movie if not earlier. There are a few plot holes I could point out, but to do so would spoil the plot.

Again, parts of The Wicker Man were entertaining, and that owes to the abilities of Nicolas Cage who seemed to be doing the best he could do in a bad situation. The actor I'm really embarrassed for is Ellen Burstyn, especially regarding her character near the end of the movie. There's really not even any room to reflect on the movie's philosophy or draw moral implications. I will resist the temptation for a slippery slope analysis of feminism gone bad. If anything, the the only moral to the story that comes to mind is for the young men cruising for chicks: be careful who it is you pick up in a bar.